Display of devotion: see the light at the National Gallery altar

Pious panel ... The Birth of the Virgin (c1440) by the Master of the Osservanza is at the National Gallery's Devotion by Design exhibition. Photograph: National Gallery

If you think visiting an art museum is a bit like going to church, the current exhibition at the National Gallery will confirm your suspicion. At the heart of Devotion by Design: Italian Altarpieces Before 1500 is an actual church, recreated in the gallery. Paintings from the collection are arranged not as we usually see them – in brightly lit clinical modern rooms – but in a dark, mysterious space. The main altarpiece by Luca Signorelli has candles and a cross in front of it, while other religious works are hung in what would have been side chapels. As a choir chants, you feel for a moment the intoxicating strangeness of an ancient Italian church.

In Naples not long ago I found myself momentarily frustrated, as a secular art lover, by the fact that Caravaggio's Seven Works of Mercy was partially obscured by candles in its setting in a chapel at the heart of the old city. But as this exhibition reminds us, that is how such paintings were meant to be seen. Paintings in the National Gallery were removed from such contexts long ago, usually by art dealers in the 18th and 19th centuries, and this exhibition restores, for a summer at least, a sense of their lost sacred settings.

Obviously, the show's recreation of a church is not literal – there are no priests, no services – but it does vividly convey the atmosphere of a Renaissance church. Meanwhile, some rare survivals of complete altarpieces in their original frames are given lyrical displays. Through this meditative exhibition you can learn a lot about art. In fact, it quietly draws attention to what is arguably the greatest revolution in western art history, and the origin of almost every visual form today, including cinema and television: the Renaissance.

In other words, religious art evolves in this exhibition from diffuse imagery to powerful visual storytelling: a bigger picture emerges. This marks the birth of a modern cognitive universe, in which visual information is organised in the most concentrated way possible to be rapidly assimilated by the viewer. Moving from the clarity of Piero della Francesca to the hyperlucidity of photographic media is a logical development once this great Renaissance leap forward was made.

The National Gallery's summer exhibitions are free, and lovingly foreground works in the gallery's own collection. This is a fascinating examination of an aspect of Renaissance painting that is obscured by the usual way of presenting these works in a gallery. It is a stimulating insight into the birth of modern European art out of the religious practices of the late middle ages. Old Italian churches may seem quaint, but they are where the modern mind began.